I study people, technology, and the worlds they make

I first read Lloyd Kahn’s Domebook years ago, when I was first working on the Bucky project. Domebook and Domebook 2 are remarkable books, amazing cultural artifacts that reflect the idealism of the communitarian strand of the counterculture. Now, he has a new book about building:

For Lloyd Kahn, the hand-built home is still where it’s at

Before McMansions, before the counterculture was granite and marble, there was Lloyd Kahn, champion of the hand-built house, a road-kill-skunk skin warming his chair, a chin-up bar suspended from the rafters.

For 35 years, Kahn, 69, has been a steadfast chronicler of offbeat owner-built shelter: straw and mud houses, solar-powered houses, geodesic domes beloved by hippies (of whom Kahn was one) and made from chopped-up cars pounded into submission and bent into triangles….

Now, from his home down a brambly dirt road with no name in Bolinas, the self-consciously reclusive coastal village in Marin County, comes “Home Work: Handbuilt Shelter,” his latest ode to humankind’s ability to create, often out of nothing, expressive and in some cases profoundly bizarre dwellings.